Gene J. Puskar/AP Photo
Former President Donald Trump is helped off the stage after being shot at a campaign event in Butler, Pennsylvania, July 13, 2024.
Right-wing activists with ties to former President Donald Trump’s administration and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 are gearing up for another volley in conservatives’ war against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies.
This time, they’re targeting women, who have historically benefited the most from affirmative action. They’re framing the planned litigation as a move to protect women, despite the fact that it would diminish women’s hiring prospects. And the argument relies on a sexist and false internet meme—claiming that the attempted assassination of Trump in July can be blamed on “DEI” policies at the U.S. Secret Service to hire more women—which was originated by conservatives themselves, and has not spread beyond right-wing circles.
The Mountain States Legal Foundation (MSLF), a conservative legal movement group, and the Independent Women’s Forum (IWF), which has been described as an anti-feminist women’s organization, are actively searching for plaintiffs to sue the Secret Service over its reported goal to attain a workforce that’s 30 percent female by 2030. The groups characterize those efforts derisively as an illegal “quota” and “DEI hiring.”
William Trachman, MSLF’s general counsel, told me they’re planning to bring a “straight up Title VII claim that using sex as a factor in hiring is discriminatory.” He added that they would want to establish a precedent that would ultimately apply to the private sector too, which would mean that virtually any explicit gender parity or diversity programs—like the nascent moves to accelerate gender balance on corporate boards—could be legally challenged.
The laws were “designed to create color blindness and gender blindness, and the fact that it’s unpopular is not a reason to avoid following the law,” Trachman said.
The claim, in other words, is one of reverse discrimination: that the historically and presently male-dominated Secret Service discriminates against men, the socially dominant sex, in employment decisions. This is much like the reverse-racism claims that underlay the historic 2023 Supreme Court ruling that outlawed race-conscious university admissions policies.
At the same time, the groups are claiming that efforts to increase women’s representation can be “divisive,” because they breed resentment in male colleagues and make women appear unqualified for their roles. That last argument is a sexist notion that surfaced and was circulated in right-wing circles, and has since been promoted almost exclusively by Republican elected officials and the very people planning to file the lawsuit.
The claim is one of reverse discrimination: that the historically and presently male-dominated Secret Service discriminates against men.
In the Court’s recent affirmative action decision, Justice Clarence Thomas took a parallel argument a step further, arguing without evidence that race-conscious admissions policies lead to “inevitable” underperformance by Black and Latino students because they’re less prepared than their white and Asian counterparts. That prompted a rare, terse, and direct rebuke from his liberal colleagues, including the Court’s first Latina and first Black female justices, who have themselves been beneficiaries of affirmative action. “Justice Thomas speaks only for himself,” the liberals wrote in dissent.
The Secret Service has also rebuked similar arguments about women coming from internet trolls, the MSLF, and a handful of Republican representatives. Anthony Guglielmi, the agency’s chief of communications, said in a statement in July that the Secret Service is “appalled by the disparaging and disgusting comments against” female officers, calling it “an insult to the women of our agency to imply that they are unqualified based on gender.” Trump himself has also deflected the attacks and criticisms of the female agents involved in the incident, defending the qualifications of female Secret Service members.
Guglielmi told me the agency doesn’t comment “on pending or proposed litigation” when I asked about the campaign by MSLF.
As things stand, the groups’ planned litigation seems like a long shot, for a number of reasons—not least because current law is pretty clear that programs like the Secret Service’s remain generally legal. Still, the recent and stunning successes by other groups associated with the conservative Christian legal movement make their campaign worth paying attention to.
TRACHMAN, WHO PREVIOUSLY SERVED in the Trump administration’s Department of Education, cited the Secret Service’s public commitments to prioritize opportunities for women as evidence of its alleged discrimination. He also pointed to the agency’s training and fitness standards, which are evaluated in consideration of gender (as well as age).
Still, when I initially asked about the planned lawsuit, Trachman led by connecting the litigation to the attempted assassination of Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. He recalled how a gunman had managed to obtain a clear line of fire toward the former president in July, and wasn’t intercepted until after he shot at and injured Trump, killed another attendee, and injured several others. “The DEI may have interacted with that event,” Trachman said.
Later, May Mailman, director of IWF’s advocacy and litigation arm, told me that they are partnering with Trachman’s organization to combat the harmful stereotype that women in male-dominated industries or prominent roles arrived there only because of diversity policies. Mailman is director of the Independent Women’s Law Center.
“Maybe it’s surprising that a women’s group would be against” hiring policies aimed at hiring more women, Mailman said. But “when agencies make it a quota to have some set number of women by some set year, completely arbitrarily, it minimizes women who are in these law enforcement agencies, and makes it seem like they are tokens.”
IWF’s participation in the lawsuit isn’t actually all that surprising.
The group and its version of conservative feminism have a long and well-studied history, from Phyllis Schlafly to Sarah Palin to Alabama Sen. Katie Britt and other women in today’s conservative movements.
Classifications based on sex generally receive less legal scrutiny in a constitutional “equal protection” challenge than those based on other characteristics, like race or religion.
Estelle Freedman, a Stanford University historian specializing in feminist studies, has commented on how some conservative groups agree with aspects of feminist politics from a libertarian perspective—focused on individual rights—while other right-wing organizations brand themselves as women’s groups in a “more cynical or more politically exploitative” manner that seeks “to subvert or appropriate the ‘feminist’ label” in order to draw women’s votes. The overall goal, masked by this claim to women’s equality, is to roll back progress on civil and human rights, as the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality recently explained.
The IWF’s history traces back to a group formed in 1991 to support Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas after he was accused of sexual harassment, The Intercept reported in 2020. The group and its affiliated 501(c)(4), the Independent Women’s Voice, have received funding from organizations connected to right-wing political operatives like the Koch brothers and Leonard Leo, according to reporting in May by Ms. magazine.
It also has a long record in the conservative culture wars and far-right legal movement, including lobbying against Title IX and the Affordable Care Act, and opposing the Violence Against Women Act, the Equal Rights Amendment, the Equality Act, the Paycheck Fairness Act, and proposals on paid family and medical leave.
More recently, IWF was a member of the right-wing coalition that put together Project 2025, which includes further attacks on women’s reproductive rights, including “abortion surveillance,” and attacks on the rights of LGBTQ people.
THE CAMPAIGN LEADERSHIP ALSO HAS fairly significant records as conservative legal culture warriors.
Mailman gained prominence in right-wing politics partly because of her role representing a group of women who unsuccessfully attempted to sue their University of Wyoming sorority for admitting a transgender woman. Her co-counsel in that case was Gene Schaerr, a noted conservative lawyer who filed a Supreme Court brief in 2015 arguing—against all available evidence and common sense—that permitting gay marriage will cause 900,000 abortions over the next 30 years, The Washington Post reported in April that year.
Mailman later became a top White House policy adviser in the Trump administration, during which she authored an email that floated the idea of releasing apprehended migrants into so-called sanctuary cities, The New York Times reported in April 2019. She was also previously vice president of a group called Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections, or RITE, which was founded in 2022 by prominent Republicans like former attorney general William Barr and GOP strategist Karl Rove, and generally sought to make it harder to vote, including supporting a radical, failed legal theory that would have given state lawmakers nearly unfettered power over federal elections.
Her partners on the “men’s rights” case against the Secret Service have a similarly long history in right-wing movements, as well as ties to Project 2025.
The Supreme Court’s current interpretations of the anti-bias laws under Title VII are favorable to the Secret Service.
Mountain States Legal Foundation has opposed business regulations, environmental protections, and affirmative action policies since at least the late 1970s, and has argued cases involving conservative political causes before the Supreme Court. The group supported the plaintiffs in the landmark 2018 case Masterpiece Cakeshop, which established that some religious business owners can legally decline to serve LGBTQ people, for example.
According to its own press releases, MSLF has retained the press relations shop ATHOS PR to work on its campaign against the Secret Service’s diversity programs. ATHOS was co-founded by Alexei Woltornist, a former public affairs official in the Department of Homeland Security during the Trump administration. Woltornist also appears in Project 2025 training videos that instruct future political appointees to ignore mainstream news outlets and focus only on right-wing media.
Trachman, MSLF’s general counsel, also helped draft the Trump administration’s 2020 Title IX regulations, which generally made it harder to report sexual harassment and sexual violence, and instituted procedures that primarily favored male students accused of harassment or assault.
In recent years, Trachman and MSLF have filed several “reverse discrimination” lawsuits, including a failed case alleging that a white corrections officer was forced to resign because he was intimidated by anti-bias training that included definitions of “white fragility.”
CLASSIFICATIONS BASED ON SEX GENERALLY receive less legal scrutiny in a constitutional “equal protection” challenge than those based on other characteristics, like race or religion. In other words, government and business have more leeway to consider sex and gender in their decision-making.
Moreover, the Supreme Court’s current interpretations of the anti-bias laws under Title VII are favorable to the Secret Service.
“If the Secret Service can show that it’s trying to address historical exclusion, and that it’s doing so in a way that does not unduly burden other groups, then its program would withstand challenge,” said Naomi Schoenbaum, a professor at George Washington University Law School who specializes in employment law and gender in the law.
Schoenbaum seemed stunned that the group actually plans to connect a “men’s rights” discrimination claim to what Trachman described as a “partially successful assassination attempt” of a presidential candidate, effectively transforming a meme from the manosphere into a “legal” argument.
“The law is often a tool to make a political statement,” Schoenbaum said. “You file a lawsuit like this, and it gets covered by Fox. Is that savvy pandering to a base of young men who feel like young women are eclipsing them? Or is that stupid because you’re going to further alienate women?”
Still, MSLF’s litigation efforts and other campaigns should be taken seriously. The same dynamics in the Secret Service case can be observed in the successful campaign to overturn race-conscious college admissions, which was achieved despite the risk of further alienating people of color from the Republican Party.
The right-wing political operative Edward Blum led a successful effort to gut the Voting Rights Act and to outlaw race-conscious admissions policies largely by cold-calling people until he found willing plaintiffs, whom he then matched with lawyers and secured funding to pay for the litigation. The theories in those cases were almost the polar opposite of anything that most lawyers understood about the VRA and the Supreme Court’s prevailing affirmative action jurisprudence; yet here we are.
In the same sense, the MSLF’s efforts might seem ridiculous today, even as they’re only a half-step away from becoming a deadly serious threat to women’s rights tomorrow.
